When we left Venice, everyone was gathering portside, where cocktails were being served in colorful acrylic glasses. And even though the beautiful old city was glowing gold in the evening sunlight, most of the men on this gay cruise were chatting and flirting and ignoring the gleaming facade of St. Mark’s, and they barely noticed the pointed tower on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
My friend Ron was occupied with someone half his age, so I wandered up to the bow where I could be alone, a rarity on a cruise ship, and noticed the thick cable attached to the tiny tugboat below. Though they are problematic in so many ways, what I love about being on a cruise is that you feel the immensity of the machine beneath you; it’s hard not to feel awe at the engineering feat of such huge ship. But at that moment I was equally aware of the tough and powerful little boat below that was safely guiding us—pulling us, actually—out to the Adriatic Sea.
I’ve read that tugboats are often driven by a single captain, and that person can spend entire days without interacting closely with another human. In other words, it’s a fine line between solitude and loneliness in the day of a tugboat operator. Perhaps that’s why the man driving this tugboat looked up at me; even from a distance, I could see his head turn toward me and nod.
It was one of those times in my life when I was fully in the moment, when I felt the beautiful connection to a stranger that always feels spiritual to me, inexplicable. Those little moments that remind me how humans are connected in ways we often cannot put into words.
My love for this tugboat, and this tugboat captain in particular, was wrapped up in my love of tugboats in general: tugboats crashing through the ice to create a safe pathway in the Arctic; tugboats pushing a ship 180 degrees, or backwards; tugboats bright red and waiting in the harbor below the Oakland Bay Bridge ready to fight a fire on any ship. They are, I think, heroic.
As a child I remember Little Toot being a favorite story, because as a diminutive boy, I was always drawn to stories about something small that made itself known as strong and capable, like the tiny people who live inside a dust speck in Horton Hears a Who (A person is a person no matter how small). Tugboats feel like more than a metaphor somehow. They embody something I want to believe about the capability and the strength of what may seem like small, insignificant people, places and things.
Anyway, that moment in Venice is etched into my memory forever, because when the cable was released, and the ship was safely out of the harbor, just before the tugboat turned back, the captain waved at me and blew the deep, throaty horn of the little boat below and I squealed with delight. I clapped with glee, just like a child.
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The prompts for this piece included the attached Google doc (“Tugboats: Tiny but Mighty”) and the Google slideshow, “Tugs.”
Slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/13ddqLm_IN6VKtEIdlsKTspyDfSVg69mxbwc4zNTNcUM/edit?usp=sharing
Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10YVlf2tHGoUaqcAdoAnIrF-KAUXpjFGSCu4Vv1JF1YA/edit?usp=sharing
The Catalyst 